Culture, High & Low 729
The Very Online Culture Wars
The Very Online Right might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more…
At Home with Dragons
The past is not completely lost to us, and the fascination with fantastic beasts remains.
The Green Knight: David Lowery’s Culturally Resonant Palimpsest of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Green Knight is a subversive film that recommends the culturally decaying virtues of generosity, courtesy, fellowship, chastity, and piety. It is a true myth worth telling.
Warnings Heeded and Unheeded: A Review of Live Not by Lies
Dreher, as prophet, gives a dire warning that, if true, means that many Christian dissidents will suffer loss of job, loss of reputation, and loss of social status. Will we…
Brass Spittoon: Ken Myers on Three Decades (almost) of Mars Hill Audio
Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio on place, the evangelical mind, and classical music.
An Artistic Ecosystem: A Review of Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care
If truth, beauty, and goodness are truly and mystically related, beauty really is dangerous—but only to evil. Reading Culture Care, and contemplating Makoto Fujimura’s art, I can believe it.
Moon Missions and the Southern Tradition
"…this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This…
A Young Girl’s Guide to Power Tools
At age 12, our daughter discovered that our front yard could be more than a place to turn cartwheels. It was also an evergreen source of income. I’d gladly pay…
Justice, Sovereignty, and the Throwaway Culture: Reading Charles Camosy
We live in a time of political disruption. In the United States and around the developed world we are seeing nationalist and populist agitation against the established liberal order. While…
Building Folklore Wealth
Our lives depend upon the restoration of intergenerational stability within our local communities as a norm that is loved and nurtured. Moreover, our recent obsession with measures such as GDP…
Culture and the Front Porch
What is culture? What hath attachment to do with culture? Why are front porches necessary for culture? Culture is something vibrant. Something living. Something that runs through the veins of…
Robo-umps and Us
As is so often the case when new technology promises to correct the errors of human fallibility, robo-umps could be bad for everyone involved.
Walking in a Dead Man’s Shoes
A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”
Joyless Moderns
The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy. And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take…
Pornified Puritans and the Logic of Pornography
Hidden Springs Lane Al Franken is only the latest prominent man to be discovered as a lecherous cad if not an outright sexual predator. His behavior toward Leeann Tweeden when…
A Few Favorable Words About Jud Heathcote
I understood immediately why Skiles was a Spartan and I was not.
Good Night, Sweet Babe Magnet
It's as if two men are talking fondly about a woman both of them were once married to.
Breaking Through the Screen Door: The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall, Twenty-Five Years Later
A couple of years ago my wife had a minor accident, the kind that results in an older car being mysteriously “totaled.” Before the man came to ferry our 2005…
To Bail or not to Bail
Recently David Brooks posted a New York Times op-ed lamenting an increase in “bailing,” which he defines as “flaking” on social commitments. The title of the article was “The…
Mr. Sillypants Goes to Washington
In a folder of papers at my desk there are reminders of things to do sometime, although they aren’t urgent. Waiting to be filed is a copy of Billy Collin’s…
And Then Came The Chickens—After the Bobcat: A Dispatch
Heaven favored me with three successive clement weekends.
On Father’s Day (With an Apostrophe)
Grand Rapids, MI Father’s Day is around the corner. I had to look up the term to see if it has an apostrophe. It does, and it has had since…